Editorial: After the smoke clears, who should report a shooting?

The greatest responsibility a citizenry can give to its guardians is the authority to use deadly force. In the United States, we have bestowed our law enforcement agencies with that responsibility. However, with that great responsibility comes a necessity for those who use deadly force to be held accountable for their decisions.

Almost any journalist can relate a story about the difficulty of trying to extract information from the police. The police are understandably tight-lipped about investigations and other ongoing issues that have not been properly vetted.

Ultimately, that often leaves self-reported crime data as the best insight that can be possessed into the working of our law enforcement agencies.

When that self-reporting becomes so flawed as to simply leave out one in five regional officer-involved fatal shootings from state and national homicide reports, as a recent report in the Register suggests, that accountability is worryingly threatened.

The Register compared crime data with reports kept by district attorneys in the region and found 67 shootings went unreported from 2007-11.

While every officer-involved shooting is investigated vigorously by the agencies involved, the article in the Register describes a reporting mechanism that lacks oversight, and is simply confusing. Jurisdictional issues seem be the biggest contributor to non-reporting, especially when multiple agencies respond to a call.

“It gets confusing as to who’s going to do the notification,” Lt. Jorge Duran, an acting captain with the San Diego Police Department, told the Register. “It’s not like we’re trying to hide it. The reporting mechanism that is set up is kind of weak.”

Police agencies in those situations seem divided on who should file the report – the agency in whose jurisdiction the shooting took place, the department whose officers were involved in the shooting, or the department that investigated the shooting.

Once contacted by the Register, many of the agencies quickly corrected the errors, and some, like the Los Angeles Police Department, even reformed their policy on reporting officer-involved shootings. That is reassuring, because clearly the system needs to be reformed.

Few oversight agencies exist among local law enforcement, and when an event as important as an officer-involved shooting falls through the bureaucratic cracks, what else might, either by accident or on purpose, be hidden from the public is a cause for concern. If anything, these reporting errors prove the need for greater oversight and accountability at many of the region’s law enforcement agencies. Ultimately, though, that responsibility would be better placed with an outside agency.

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